Re: w3.org site construction

On 1 Apr 2011, at 6:26 AM, Alvaro Sanchez Ramirez wrote:

> Hello.
> How is the w3.org web-site built?
> Do you use any CMS (content management system) or is it just plain html pages?

That is a big question and I would like (some day) to write this up. The answer is that:

 * We use a lot of different tools. Some of them we wrote ourselves.
 * Some pages are centrally managed, others are not (meaning it it hard to update the instances when the templates change).
 * We wrote our own tool to build instances from templates + content + rules. (We based our rule language on xpath.)
 * We have other home-grown systems that regenerate pages when various events occur.
 * We wrote a tool to manage the information architecture and generate breacrumbs, menu items, etc. (which are fragments we then insert using our previously mentioned tool).

And more. We investigated using an off-the-shelf CMS and decided that rather than customize it to our extensive infrastructure, we should roll our own. There are, of course, costs and benefits to that decision.

Ian

--
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)    http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel:                                      +1 718 260 9447

Received on Friday, 1 April 2011 16:30:08 UTC